Ceremony
How ceremony and ritual can offer relief and celebration as we heal
A ceremony, or ritual, is a way of celebrating and inviting a special occasion, life transition or passing into the present moment and honouring it through a variety of different ways. This could be with fire, at Solstice, in water, under a new moon, with sound, in the woods, alone or with family and in many other ways, but essentially ceremonies are all created in the name of healing, love, respect, grounding, releasing, manifesting and for different personal reasons (or purely for the fact that you like doing it).
Ceremonies are nourishing tools to help us in listening to our intuition and heart so that they may lead us to a space where we can create comforting and cathartic experiences around change, solo or together in community. They offer consolation in times of emotional distress or mourning, an opportunity for us to alchemise pain into something magical, and they can also help soothe our souls when we’re not exactly sure what we’re in need of.
I tend to come to things intuitively and over the past four years I’ve naturally adopted ritual and ceremony into my life, with clients and friends, through smudging and smoke, teas, sound, circles, the seasons, incense, the moon and anything else that my eyes twinkle at. I’ve realised that ceremony is part of my everyday and how I enjoy celebrating all the divine and challenging moments that exist across the seasons, and becoming a conscious witness to them.
Maybe it’s because I’m a Taurean woman, ruled by venus, who loves to incorporate beauty, the body and the fullness of each experience into these ceremonies, or maybe I learned a little bit of ceremonial spunk from my mamma who always prepped for social events at home in her own special way, making little hand-written cards and gestures for guests, with flowers in vases and candles dotted around the rooms. Whatever it is, I knew our home as a sanctuary of pleasure and conviviality in many ways, and this is perhaps why ceremony and the homespace are so special to me (a feeling, more than a physical place) and it’s currently where I do many of my ceremonies.
When I was little, I remember adopting an interesting, old wooden side table from my maternal grandmother, who I briefly met as a mini water baby, to run an occasional tiny shop outside of my bedroom for family when they came over. It was beautifully adorned with shining mother of pearl mosaics and wooden carvings and I’d sell things like soaps and shells, or cards with dried flowers that I’d pressed, and anything I found that I could add a bit of life to.
Who knew this tiny little piece of my small family history - octagonal (8) in shape, which has also come to mean a great deal to me, as I’m sure to many, as a number, symbol of infinity, the ouroboros birth and death cycles and serpentine or dragon energy - would help pave the way for my own profound healing and awakening at the end of 2019, start of 2020. A piece of furniture that I would lug with me to university and every London flat that I ever lived in, now proudly cradles my cherished altar. Here I sit in the morning, rising with meditation, smudging and other rituals personal to me, and in the evening, calling back my energy after the sun goes down (or actually to just have a big ol’ blub😭).
Sometimes life’s challenges don’t let up and finding solace and celebration in rituals has been one of the biggest gifts to my peace of mind and I’m happy to support others on their own steps towards personal healing with ceremony. Even when training in sound therapy, I loved the ceremony around the practice and client sound massages, the offering and how we connect to cosmic realms and welcome divine support through our bowls.
Rituals and ceremony is the stuff of magic and deep inner knowing. Today, they have brought me to a place where I have healed from lots of things, am healing from a few other bits and bobs, and I can regulate my own emotional needs and releases, whenever and wherever. I can (for those thinking it) survive without a palo stick or lavender essential oil around me, but sometimes we just like what we like and how it makes us feel.
We can create a ceremony for anything that we choose to make sacred, move on from, grow into and more - the soul knows no bounds when time for cleansing and nourishment is needed. It’s all about intention, and some people work with tradition, and others create new and unique ceremonies for themselves and clients for in a particular moment in time.
As a Brit (some might say Wiccan too), Celtic ceremonies have drawn me close for many years, especially Equinox and Solstice seasonal celebrations (I’ve been welcoming in this powerful Spring Equinox energy with some strong women at my first ever SATIATE Day Retreat this weekend). Many of us who follow the celtic calendar (and Wiccan practices) are not bound by time, but instead we connect with the natural seasons, the wheel of the year and cycles of the moon (if you haven’t tried it, you might like it, it’s very nurturing for the soul). Personally, I’ve still not started 2022 fully, the ‘new year’, until Aries fires up later this week - I’ve been shedding a lot in ceremonies these past winter months.
Ancestrally, however, I get drawn to the motherland and think back to many of the vibrant and joyful ceremonies that I’ve witnessed around birth, harvest, life and death in Africa. I’ve also been dipping into texts from Tibet and Egypt to get a better understanding of the different views on consciousness, death and soul work.
Recently, I sat with a lovely Romanian lady and her Turkish friend, Hilal, and we did a small ceremony together to mark the new moon and total solar eclipse in December 2021. Hilal talked about her grandmother and traditional clearing ceremonies in Turkey, where they use onion and garlic skin in a pan and burn it as a way of clearing energies and spiritual cleansing.
With this said, ceremony can mark anything from a:
Rites of passage or coming of age
Life transitions - heart break, career change
Passing thresholds
Sacred union - wedding blessing
Bridal blessing way
The passing of a loved one
The passing of a pet
New home
Baby blessing way
Birthing
Termination of pregnancy
Cleansing and clearing rituals
Transformation - psychedelic ceremony
Having sadly experienced a pregnancy termination in my late twenties and then being serendipitously gifted my beloved fertility doll by an elder walking past me in Ghana (when I visited just a few weeks after that difficult moment - a reason why Ghana will always have a unique place in my heart), I’ve felt called to go back in my own timelines and have carried out personal ceremonies for life transitions and experiences that I too needed to lay to rest, in order to recalibrate my body, mind and soul in the here and now, and to honour what has come before.
Overall, ceremonies allow us to deepen our connection to self, our spirituality and they can also strengthen our community bonds. They can provide incredible containers for transformation and it’s beautiful to witness, and be part of, the revival of ancient practices and medicine that can help our healing - many forgotten gifts from our ancestors that are becoming more and more needed as we move into new times.
If reading this piece has sparked an interest for you, let me know. I’m now offering 1-2-1 or small group ceremonies at my Healing Space in Barnet, EN5, and privately too - see Services.
